PRIMARY MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: 1969

At 9:32 a.m. Eastern daylight time on July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 left
Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, bound for the moon. Four
days later, at 4:18 p.m. EDT on July 20, Neil Armstrong skilfully set
the lunar module Eagle down in the Sea of Tranquility and
reported, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has
landed."26 For the next 10 minutes
Armstrong and Aldrin were occupied with several post-landing procedures,
reconfiguring switches and systems. Armstrong found time to report to
Mission Control what he had been too busy to tell them during the
landing: that he had manually flown the lunar module over the rockstrewn
crater where the automatic landing system was taking it. Then he made
his first quick-look science report:

We'll get to the details of what's around here, but it
looks like a collection of just about every variety of shape,
angularity, granularity, about every variety of rock you could find. . .
. There doesn't appear to be too much of a general color at all.
However, it looks as though some of the rocks and boulders, of which
there are quite a few in the near area, it looks as though they're going
to have some interesting colors to them. . . .27

After giving Houston as many clues as he could to the location of their
module, he added some more description:

The area out the left-hand window is a relatively
level plain cratered with a fairly large number of craters of the 5- to
50-foot variety, and some ridges - small, 20, 30 feet high, I would
guess, and literally thousands of little 1- and 2-foot craters around
the area. We see some angular blocks out several hundred feet in front
of us that are probably 2 feet in size and have angular edges. There is
a hill in view, just about on the ground track ahead of us. Difficult to
estimate, but might be half a mile or a mile.28

Armstrong and Aldrin then started preparing their spacecraft for
takeoff, setting up critical systems to be ready in case something
happened and they had to leave the lunar surface quickly. A short break
in this activity gave Armstrong a chance to pass along more information
about the landing site:

. . . The local surface is very comparable to that we
observed from orbit at this sun angle, about 10 degrees sun angle, or
that nature. It's pretty much without color. It's . . . a very white,
chalky gray, as you look into the zero-phase line [directly toward the
sun]; and it's considerably darker gray, more like . . . ashen gray as
you look out 90 degrees to the sun. Some of the surface rocks in close
here that have been fractured or disturbed by the rocket engine plume
are coated with this light gray on the outside; but where they've been
broken, they display a dark, very dark gray interior; and it looks like
it could be country basalt.29

Setting up the spacecraft systems took another hour and a half to
complete; then they were ready to get out and explore. The flight plan
called for them to eat and then rest for four hours, but Aldrin called
Mission Control to recommend starting their surface exploration in about
three hours' time. Houston concurred.30
Although they had been awake almost 11 hours and had gone through some
stressful moments during the landing,* it seemed too much to expect the first men
on the moon to take a nap before they made history.

While Armstrong and Aldrin tended to their postlanding chores, Mike
Collins, orbiting 60 nautical miles (112 kilometers) overhead in the
command module Columbia, had little to do. Houston enlisted
his aid in an attempt to locate Eagle, giving him the best
map coordinates they could derive from the sketchy information
available. With his navigational sextant Collins scanned several spots,
without success; Columbia passed over the landing site too
rapidly to allow him to search the area thoroughly and he never found
the lunar module.31 Determination of
its exact location had to wait for postmission analysis of Armstrong's
descriptions of the area and examination of the spacecraft's landing
trajectory.

Getting ready to leave the lunar module took longer than the crew had
anticipated. It was after 9:30 p.m. in Houston, an hour and a half later
than they had hoped, when they opened the hatch. Armstrong carefully
worked his way out onto the "porch," then climbed down the
ladder, pausing on the lowest rung to comment on the texture of the
surface and the depth to which the footpads had penetrated. At 9:56 p.m.
he stepped onto the moon's surface, proclaiming, "That's one small
step for man, one giant leap for mankind" - inadvertently omitting
an "a" before "man" and slightly changing the
meaning he intended to convey.32

Armstrong made a cursory inspection of the lunar module and reported his
reactions to the new environment. Aldrin then lowered a camera on the
lunar equipment carrier - a clothesline and pulley arrangement that
seemed out of place in the high-technology environment of Apollo - which
Armstrong immediately began using. Mission Control reminded him to scoop
up the contingency sample, which he did. "I'll try to get a rock in
here. Just a couple." He noted that the collecting tool met
resistance after penetrating a short distance into the surface material.
He then stowed the sample in a bag that he tucked into a pocket of his
suit. To the scientists on earth he remarked, "Be advised that a
lot of the rock samples out here, the hard rock samples, have what
appear to be vesicles in the surface. Also, I am looking at one now that
appears to have some sort of phenocryst."**33

Aldrin then joined Armstrong on the surface, and they spent the next
several minutes inspecting the landing craft and reporting on its
condition, adjusting to the low lunar gravity and trying various ways of
getting around on the surface. After a brief commemorative ceremony
(reading the plaque attached to the lunar module) and a short
conversation with President Richard Nixon, they began unloading and
emplacing the scientific instruments and collecting samples. They
supplemented earth's limited television view of their activities with
descriptions of what they were seeing and doing. On a couple of
occasions they acted like field geologists. Aldrin reported that he saw
a rock that sparkled "like some kind of biotite," but he
"would leave that to further analysis."*** After closely examining some rounded
boulders near the spacecraft, Armstrong said they looked "like
basalt, and they have probably two percent white minerals in them. . . .
And the thing that I reported as vesicular before, I don't believe that
any more. . . . they look like little impact craters where BB shot has
hit the surface."34

The geologists in Houston watching this surface activity on television
were quite pleased with the astronauts' performance. At one point
Armstrong disappeared from the field of view of the TV camera, causing
some momentary anxiety at his apparent departure from the plan. It
turned out that some unusual rocks had attracted his attention and he
had gone off a few meters to collect them. That was exactly the kind of
thing the geologists had hoped people on the moon would do.35 By the time the crew had taken two core
samples, again experiencing difficulty in driving a sampling tool into
the surface, and filled their sample return containers, Houston notified
them that it was time to wind up their activity. Just before midnight
CapCom**** Bruce McCandless told
Aldrin to "head on up the ladder," and at 12:11 a.m. Houston
time both men and their samples were back in the lunar module and the
hatch was sealed.36 Humanity's first
excursion on the surface of another celestial body had lasted 2 hours,
31 minutes, and 40 seconds.

Back inside the lunar module, Armstrong and Aldrin removed their lunar
surface suits and portable life-support systems and used up their
remaining film. Houston passed up some more instructions in preparation
for liftoff and tentatively signed off for the night, but before long
CapCom Owen Garriott, who had relieved McCandless, came on the line with
some questions from the scientists about the nature of the surface and
the problems in driving sampling tools into the surface. Three hours
after they returned to the lunar module, the lunar explorers finally
were able to turn in for a few hours of fitful sleep.37

Next morning Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins spent most of their time
setting up Eagle and Columbia for liftoff and
rendezvous. Before the lunar module left the moon, however, Armstrong
gave Mission Control a detailed description of the landing approach path
and landing area, in the hope of helping scientists locate their exact
landing spot, and summarized the characteristics of the soil and rocks
around the area.38

Liftoff and rendezvous went smoothly. When the two spacecraft were
locked together Collins cracked Columbia's oxygen supply
valve and Aldrin opened the lunar module's vent valve, to create a gas
flow into the LM when the hatches were opened - part of the procedure to
minimize back-contamination-while Aldrin and Armstrong vacuumed the
lunar dust from their suits as best they could. Their vacuum cleaner, a
brush attached to the exhaust hose of the LM suit system, was not very
powerful and the tenacious dust came off only with difficulty. There was
not nearly as much loose dust in the lunar module as they had expected
when they returned from the surface; evidently it stuck tightly to
whatever it touched.39 They passed the
rock boxes and other items over to Collins and then clambered into the
command module, where they removed their suits and stowed them in the
bags provided. After jettisoning the lunar module and straightening up
the command module, the three astronauts settled in for an uneventful
trip back to earth.40

In the early morning hours of July 24, 8 days, 3 hours, 18 minutes, and
18 seconds after leaving Kennedy Space Center, Columbia
plopped down into the Pacific Ocean about 200 nautical miles (370
kilometers) south of Johnston Island. Recovery crews from the U.S.S.
Hornet arrived quickly and tossed the biological isolation
garments into the spacecraft. After the cocooned astronauts emerged from
the spacecraft the swimmers swabbed the hatch down with Betadine (an
organic iodine solution); then astronauts and recovery personnel
decontaminated each other's protective garments with sodium hypochlorite
solution. The biological isolation garments were not uncomfortable in
the recovery raft, but aboard the helicopter they began accumulating
heat. Both Collins and Armstrong felt that they were approaching the
limit of their tolerance by the time they reached the ship.41 An hour after splashdown they were inside the
mobile quarantine facility. As soon as they had changed into clean
flight suits, the astronauts went to the large window at the rear end of
the mobile quarantine facility to accept the nation's congratulations
from President Nixon, who had flown out to the Hornet to
meet them.42

Meanwhile, recovery crews brought Columbia on board and
connected it to the astronauts' temporary home by means of a plastic
tunnel. Through this, the film magazines and sample return containers
were taken into the quarantine trailer, then passed out through a
decontamination lock. Sample return container no. 2, holding the
documented sample, was packed in a shipping container along with film
magazines and tape recorders and flown to Johnston Island, where it was
immediately loaded aboard a C-141 aircraft and dispatched to Ellington
Air Force Base near MSC. Six and a half hours later the other sample
return container was flown to Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, and thence
to Houston.43

* While Armstrong was maneuvering to
avoid a boulder field, alarms sounded in the lunar module indicating
that the computer was overloaded. Mission Control quickly told the crew
to proceed. Then, as fuel was running low, a dust cloud obscured the
surface and Armstrong had to touch down without a good view of his
landing spot.

** That is, the rocks had surface
pits resembling those caused by the escape of gases from molten material
(which could indicate a volcanic origin), and one seemed to have a
prominent embedded crystal.

*** This comment drew criticism from
some scientists on the ground that biotite (a mica-like mineral) could
not have formed on the moon. The criticism was unwarranted, because
Aldrin had not said that it was biotite, but that it looked like biotite
he had seen on field trips; the criticism was mildly detrimental,
because it made the next crew more reluctant to use technical
terminology, with which some of the astronauts felt uncomfortable
anyway, in describing what they saw. H. H. Schmitt interview, May 30,
1984.

**** The "Capsule
Communicator" - a term left over from the Mercury days when
spacecraft were called "capsules" - normally was the only
person who talked to crews in space over the radio circuit. All CapComs
were astronauts, most often astronauts who had not yet flown. Appendix 6 lists CapCom assignments for all
Apollo flights.

32. Air-to-Ground, p. 377; Brooks,
Grimwood, and Swenson,Chariots, p. 346. After the crew returned to Houston,
press representatives repeatedly asked what Armstrong had actually said.
The Apollo news center at MSC issued the following release (copy in box
078-56, JSC History Office files) on July 30, 1969: "Armstrong said
that his words when he first stepped onto the moon were: "That's
one small step for a man, ode giant leap for mankind" not
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" as
originally transcribed."